Chana Timoner, 46, Rabbi and Chaplain, Dies

By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.

Published: July 17, 1998

Chana Timoner, a onetime housewife with such a passionate devotion to tradition and social justice that she became first a rabbi and then the first Jewish woman to serve as a full-time Army chaplain, died on Monday at her home in New Haven. She was 46 and had received a medical discharge earlier this year after developing the Epstein-Barr virus.

Her husband, Dr. Julian Timoner, a chiropractor who persuaded state authorities to release the body without an autopsy, said he believed that his wife had accidentally taken a fatal overdose combination of her prescribed medication and her usual sleeping pills.

Anyone who was surprised when Ms. Timoner, then a self-styled housewife and couch potato, began five years of intense religious training at age 33 or who was surprised even more when she entered the Army and endured six weeks of grueling basic training at age 39, simply had not been paying attention.

For Ms. Timoner, a New Haven native whose father was a railroad carpenter, religion, the military and pushing limits were all family traditions.

Her Russian-born maternal grandfather had been a rabbi in New Haven, and her mother had been so eager to fight the Nazis in World War II that she joined the Canadian Army in 1940, a year before the United States entered the war and she was able to transfer to the newly organized Women's Army Corps.

By the time Ms. Timoner enrolled in Southern Connecticut State College in New Haven, she had developed expansive dreams that included later study at the University of Jerusalem.

Then she made the mistake of dropping by a local Jewish community center one night. Dr. Timoner was there, too, and, well, it's an old story, and by the time she began giving it her own personal twist, Ms. Timoner had been married at 18, had had two children by the time she graduated and had endured a grin-and-bear-it decade as a distinctly restless housewife and mother.

Ms. Timoner, who had always been deeply involved in religion and who had been struggling with herself over whether to become a rabbi, attributed her decision to begin religious studies in 1984 to a friend who told her one day: ''You know, in 7 years you could be a 40-year-old housewife or you could be a 40-year-old rabbi.''

The next day, Ms. Timoner said, ''I was on the phone,'' finding out how to enter rabbinical training.

She enrolled in the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York and spent the next five years making long daily trips to New York City. Then, after her ordination in 1989, she spent two more commuting years studying for a doctorate at the New York Theological Seminary, completing the course work but deferring her dissertation.

Although she was far from the first woman to become a rabbi, most had been affiliated with the liberal Reform Jewish tradition, and as a committed adherent of the more austere Conservative tradition, Rabbi Timoner had trouble finding a post.

Then when she did find one, as rabbi of the Beth El Synagogue in Wallingford, Conn., her career ran afoul of her own principles. When she refused to bend the rules to perform a bar mitzvah for a youth with a Jewish father and a gentile mother without the required religious circumcision ritual, she was forced to step down.

After working for the National Council of Christians and Jews and as a hospital chaplain, Rabbi Timoner joined the Army Reserves and in 1993 became the first Jewish woman to serve as a full-time chaplain in the regular Army.

On the day in 1993 that she began her first assignment, at Fort Bragg, N.C., her husband recalled yesterday, President Clinton announced his ''don't ask, don't tell'' policy on homosexuals in the military, prompting Rabbi Timoner to make an announcement of her own: she would gladly provide a full range of counseling for gay soldiers.

The position, which shocked her fellow chaplains at the base, was simply par for the Timoner course. When she had learned that homosexuals, even those with the AIDS virus, were being shunned by the Jewish religious establishment in Connecticut, she formed study groups for Jewish homosexuals and became active in AIDS organizations.

As the only Jewish chaplain at Fort Bragg, Rabbi Timoner held regular Friday services for the few Jewish soldiers at the base, but as the chaplain for a helicopter battalion there she spent most of her time counseling the soldiers, many of them women, none of them Jewish.

After a brief stint in Korea, where the Epstein-Barr virus and the related chronic fatigue syndrome were first diagnosed, Captain Timoner completed her Army service at Fort Benning, Ga., where, as usual, she made waves, especially when she insisted on adding prayers for Catholic, gay and gypsy victims of the Nazi terror at a Holocaust service.

No one should have been surprised. After all, when Elie Wiesel once addressed a large Jewish gathering at Yale and made an impassioned reference to ''the six million,'' Rabbi Timoner, who was sitting on the first row, had felt compelled to stand and chide him for not including the other oppressed groups who died in the gas chambers.

In addition to her husband, Rabbi Timoner is survived by her mother, Mary Surasky of Tampa, Fla.; a daughter, Aviva, of Paris; a son, Samson, of Germantown, Md.; a sister, Abby Sawilowsky, of Oak Park, Mich., and two brothers, Miron Surasky of Oakland, Calif., and Charles Surasky of Yardley, Pa.